Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we check in on a couple recent copyright cases that touch on some of our favorite subjects: fantasy novels and tabletop games.
In January, a Rhode Island federal court ruled that the heirs of some people involved with the creation of the tabletop board game The Game of Life could not control the board game's intellectual property, at least from a copyright standpoint. This was a huge win for Hasbro, who stood otherwise to potentially lose the rights to print the still-popular classic of the tabletop industry.
In the 1950s, the physical prototype for Life was made by employees of Bill Markham. However, a fellow toy developer named Reuben Kramer developed the idea into a product at his own expense, which made him the sole rights controller when it came to copyrights. Under separate agreements, Kramer has been paying Markham and his estate more than 30% of royalties received from the license with Hasbro, but the court judged that this does not mean they also share control of the copyright.
This is important because in recent years, more copyright owners have taken advantage of a right known as the termination right. For licenses and assignments of copyright that occurred on or after 1978, the original author or their heirs can terminate the license or assignment 35 or 40 years after those rights are granted. This has come into play starting in the last 3-5 years, and it generally allows authors to re-negotiate successful licenses or assignments to extract more money from a publisher.
Markham's estate and company were claiming control of the copyright based on their involvement of making the game prototype, which would have allowed them to exercise the termination right and go directly for more money from Hasbro or some other game publisher. But the court held that this was a work made for hire under the law, therefore controlled only by the financial backer Kramer, who can choose for himself whether to terminate the copyright license and renegotiate his terms. It's obviously easier for Hasbro to negotiate if necessary with one owner instead of many, so that's why this is a big win for Hasbro in their game of life.
Our second story comes from the past week, when a Florida federal court dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Stephen King based on The Dark Tower series. A nephew of a now-deceased comic writer William DuBay claimed that DuBay's 1977 horror comic book The Rook had been ripped off by King when he created the wildly-successful Dark Tower series of novels. With this series now spawning a movie and a TV series, a finding of copyright infringement could lead to massive damages for DuBay's heirs.
But the Florida court dismissed this claim because while there is some overlap between the time-traveling cowboy lead characters of these two works, this was only a surface level similarity and the differences or dissimilarities go much deeper for these characters and works. Even if Stephen King had been inspired by The Rook, which seems uncontested, he created his own universe and copied only typical tropes and well-known story elements in these fiction genres, according to the court. So just like Hasbro, King can sleep a little better knowing his IP has been defended against a financial and legal attack.
The Bottom Line is, these are but two of many examples of how successful creators or publishers can fall into legal battles when big money is involved for copyrighted works. The music industry is rife with such copyright claims and lawsuits, for example. With copyright terminations now becoming a viable option, expect even more big stories and products containing creative authorship works in the future. We'll keep our eyes on future cases of nerdy interest, but if you ever need help navigating these choppy waters of copyrights and IP, just reach out to the Legal Geek or another local counsel.
----------------------------------
Do you have a question? Send it in!
Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy
No comments:
Post a Comment